Forever 21 relists controversial Kurt Cobain T-shirt

Forever 21 will continue selling a version of Kurt Cobain’s hand-drawn Flipper shirt, despite outcry from music fans and grunge holdouts.

The shirt features a the crudely-drawn homage to the punk band Flipper, an early influence of Nirvana. The design is nearly identical to the one Cobain drew on a T-shirt worn during a 1992 Saturday Night Live performance.

The Flipper commemorated on Kurt Cobain’s T-shirt is not the ’60s TV series about the friendly dolphin (though there’s no reason to think he didn’t enjoy that too) — it’s the brash, irreverent San Francisco punk band. Flipper formed in 1979, and has broken up and re-formed multiple times; in 2006 their lineup was augmented by Cobain’s former Nirvana bandmate Krist Novoselic, who played with the group until 2008.

Kurt himself drew the design for this Flipper tee; in fact, he sported his DIY Flipper shirts in photos for Nirvana’s “In Utero” album artwork and during their first “Saturday Night Live” performance.